BLOGPOST SPECIAL: A FARE PLAY FOR VOICES

BLOGPOST SPECIAL:  A NEW SHORT RADIO DRAMA
A FARE PLAY FOR VOICES

by Dave Duggan       

This is a media note for my new short radio drama, with Amanda Burton, Bronagh Gallagher and Alan Wright as the three voices. Come see and or simply listen!

A FARE PLAY FOR VOICES by Dave Duggan, as part of the programme Broadcasting House, arises from a welcome commission from BBC Radio 4 that I write a short play for voices, an echo, as it were, of Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood, only in a real, not an imagined place. The brief was to offer listeners an aural experience of our city, Derry Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West), at this time, on the threshold of 2013, while drawing upon its rich history. I conceived of a first-time visitor (the listener) arriving in the city, getting into a taxi at the airport and being taken on a brisk taxi run and tour, taking in both sides of the river - the river is a central theme in the piece - with a taxi driver (Bronagh Gallagher) who keeps up a warm and vigorous patter all through. The second voice is the Sat Nav (Amanda Burton) who uses historical texts and guide books from 1776 to the present day to reveal the history and geography of the city. The third voice is the Car Radio (Alan Wright), who offers sound effects and snatches of famous songs in a jazzy style. The power of radio drama is its capacity to create images in the listener's imagination by bringing the city to life through words only. BBC Radio 4, in particular the programme Broadcasting House, has a huge audience and the ability to convene a fine cast, all of whom are from the city, working locally, nationally and internationally.  I've enjoyed writing the piece and look forward to working with the cast to achieve an engaging performance. It goes out live from The Playhouse on the morning of Sunday 30th December at 9 00am. Tickets to attend the live broadcast of the 1 hour magazine programme are free and available from The Playhouse, telephone  028 71 268 027. It's an early start - they'll want you seated by 8 30am - or you can tune in and pull the duvet up around you.


Here's a link to the programme   via  http://tinyurl.com/cuoxc3m

AUSTERITY, NATIVITY AND AESTHETICS

For I feared you, because you are an austere man. You collect what you did not deposit, and reap what you did not sow.

A very popular story this mid-winter involves homelessness, a young single mother, imperialist state repression, a baby born to poverty, bling from the east, angelic choral embellishments and the solid smell of warm beasts – sheep, cows, donkey.

And she brought forth her first-born Son, and wrapped Him in swaddling cloths, and laid Him in a manger, because there was no room for them in the inn.

These victims of austerity and ethno-racial discrimination join millions of others in mythic and living narratives as the austere men, who reap what they do not sow and collect what they do not deposit, continue to wreak casino-capitalist havoc across the world.

Where, then, is beauty? 

as subtler aesthetic shifts changed what we think of as normal.

The idea of aesthetics goes deeper than appearance; it also covers what things feel like, meaning that taste and sentiment come into play too.

Boom and bust economic practices blatantly use 'bust' to drive citizens further and further into austerity so soon after the boom during which

 property porn became a staple,

spectacle replaced soul, and sometimes also substituted itself for meaning,

as the world fell foul of 

a global money-making juggernaut, glittering yet rootless.

The new normal is all austerity, never prosperity, relentlessly never fairness, with a 

bigger-must-be-better mentality

leading to perverse notions about money, worth and value, where

money and celebrity has cast a shadow over the art world which is prohibiting ideas and debate.

Boom aesthetics gave rise to the lie that you have to pay huge salaries to get people to work in certain industries, that those salaries reflect their worth as individuals and that money is the only way to give people the respect of their peers. 

Where are the new stories in such a world?

As the worlds of art and literature demonstrate, people will find a way to do what they love to do. They also show how an influx of money can skew things and how making the rewards solely fiscal impoverishes everything.

Is it possible to create new stories? Is it possible to give birth to new economics, that do not blast, boom and bust citizens?

It would be interesting to construct an alternative model based on the economics of arts organisations, small festivals, arts collectives, community projects and creative co-operatives. It might not save the world, but it might remind us that what has come to stand for normal is, like flares, only a fashion.

The passion for creation – new birth/nativity – is aesthetic. And economic. Oscar Wilde, never austere, knew that 

in nations as in individuals, if the passion for creation be not accompanied by the critical, the aesthetic faculty also, it will be sure to waste its strength. 

http://www.biblegateway.com/                 Luke 19:21; Luke 2:7

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2012/1215/1224327857964.html

http://www.imagi-nation.com/moonstruck/clsc38w4.html

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

WATCHING SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS

The cinema-goer watches Seven Psychopaths, the newly released film by Martin McDonagh, with five other people in a multi-screen cinema; three men and a woman and a man, all aged twenty-five to thirty years. 

Seven Psychopaths is genred 'comedy' and 'crime' by the International Movie Data Base (imdb).

No one laughs.

Una Mullally, writing in The Irish Times, watches the film with a different audience.

I watched Seven Psychopaths at a screening mainly attended by people who work in film. With such an audience, the thigh-slapping after every joke would have been drowned out only by the backslapping when an Irish film, or one perceived to be Irish, gets a wide release.

The cinema-goer sees the film open badly. A visual cliché segues into blandly unfunny dialogue, which alludes to the work of Quentin Tarantino, in a scene that ends with another visual cliché: a man in a red ski-mask shooting men in the back of the head. 

No one laughs. The cinema-goer has no sense of witnessing a crime on film.

The sense of something unoriginal unfolding in front of the cinema-goer leads to thoughts of leaving the cinema.

Further visual, textual and directorial allusions and clichés follow in a disengaging narrative. Any dramatic weight is lost when what's at stake is the stealing of pets from self-obsessed rich people. The fetishising of pets by psychopaths is a theme Martin McDonagh has used before, in his stage-play The Lieutenant of Inishmore.

The film-makers appeal to irony. It is worrying when artists present their intentions in interviews rather than in the work itself.

But its self-knowledge doesn’t make its humiliating depictions of women and infantile homophobia any less lame. In stand-up you can get away with making jokes about rape, paedophilia, the Holocaust or whatever you’re having yourself as long as they’re funny, as long as the pay-off is greater than the offensiveness. Transfer that test to film and McDonagh fails.

Jokes or not, no one laughs.

The cinema-goer wonders if irony is possible in mainstream films. Does the two-dimensional nature of the medium thoroughly flatten all nuance?

No one laughs. There is a patent absence of wit. One of the men guffaws. Snorts? Belches?

The cinema-goer, on a separate occasion, sees a pantomime. A dwarf approaches the front of the stage and says 'Women are only trouble, aren't they lads?' which reaps muted groans of agreement from some males in the audience and tired groans of 'oh, come on, you grumpy dwarf, you can do better that' from most others.  A four year old boy asserts: 'Women are not trouble, so they're not.'

The cinema-goer wonders how the child's resistance to such grim clichés, ironic or not, will hold up, when faced with them in adult films. 

Is there more irony in a panto than in a contemporary film?

McDonagh is remarkably talented. I’m a fan. But I don’t think I’ve experienced a more depressing moment in film this year than a cinemaful of people laughing at the last (of many) “fag” jokes in Seven Psychopaths. I’m sure some people got the bludgeoning “subtlety” of its context, but tell that to those who have the same slurs shouted across the street at them when McDonagh isn’t there to hold up a neon irony sign.

The cinema-goer notes the colour palette in the film is neon, day-time and night-time, interiors and exteriors. Scenes of The Joshua Tree National Park (33 degrees North, 115 degrees West), handy to Los Angeles and already another cliché, fill the cinema-goer with a dreaded sense of an artist aping other artists with whom he may be friendly or appears to want to be friendly with, by way of knowing asides. Is there Bono-money in this production? 

Redemption is often a theme in comedy and crime films. The cinema-goer sees it in the stirring performances of Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell. Colin Farrell plays well too. It is not his fault that he is playing another cliché: a drunken Irishman. The cinema-goer reflects that contemporary Irish writers are not drunks. 

There are women in the film. Their fate is an early exit. They are suffered, shagged (almost) and shot. 

The representation of women is a joke within the film itself, that women exist in movies only to be killed, along with the undercurrent throughout that it’s far less acceptable to kill animals in a film than it is to kill women.

On screen, only 11 per cent of protagonists in last year’s top 100 films were women.

At the end, the cinema-goer leaves the cinema with a question faced after watching In Bruges. 

Why are resources of talent and money deployed to make such witless work?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1931533/

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/weekend/2012/1208/1224327639287.html

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

LOOKING DIFFERENT. FEELING IRISH

The title is from The Irish Times, dated Saturday 24th November 2012, above an article featuring interviews with the grown-up children of immigrants to Ireland.

Everyone has a capacity to be racist if they don't stop themselves, and the bulk of it is about ignorance.

Aaron Cunningham is a talented Gaelic footballer, playing for the best club team in Ireland, Crossmaglen (54 degrees North, 6 degrees West) Rangers.

The Gaelic Athletic Association / Cumann Lúthchleas Gael is a 32 county sporting and cultural organisation that has a presence on all five continents. It is Ireland's largest sporting organisation and is celebrated as one of the great amateur sporting associations in the world today. It is part of the Irish consciousness and plays an influential role in Irish society that extends far beyond the basic aim of promoting Gaelic games.

Aaron's father, Joey Cunningham, is black and was himself a star Gaelic footballer, playing for the celebrated Armagh county team.

If you use that example, that Ireland accepts Phil Lynott and Paul McGrath, I'm not sure it proves Ireland isn't racist.

Aaron is racially abused during a championship match and the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) investigates. 

That's why I want to bring in a rule about racism in the GAA.

Crossmaglen Rangers win the match and their third Ulster Club title in a row. Aaron plays a vital part in his club's success.

I could be sitting in a room full of Irish blond, blue-eyed people and that I'm not thinking about the fact I'm the only dark-haired tan person.

The GAA, a manifestly Irish institution, who's members have themselves suffered abuse and discrimination, in Ireland and internationally, as Irish people and sports' people, faces a challenge.

1.12

 Anti-Sectarian/Anti-Racist 

 The Association is Anti-Sectarian and Anti-Racist. Any conduct by deed, word or gesture of a sectarian or racist nature against any player, official, spectator or anyone else, in the course of activities organised by the Association, shall be deemed to have discredited the Association. Penalty: As prescribed in Rule 7.2(e).  

A challenge for fathers, sport, race. A challenge for literature? 

Nigerian writers Ben Okri and Chinua Achebe put the ball in the back of the net.

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me - unintentionally - was witnessing the courage with which he bore adversity.

 ...... it's not difficult to identify with somebody like yourself, somebody next door who looks like you. What's more difficult is to identify with someone you don't see, who's very far away, who's a different colour, who eats a different kind of food. When you begin to do that then literature is really performing its wonders.  

The Irish Times: newspaper; Dublin; 24.11.2012

www.gaa.ie

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

FIXED LAWS OF SUFFERING AS TWO STATES

Palestine becomes a non-member, observer state in the United Nations by an overwhelming majority of 138 'Yes' votes to nine 'No' votes and 41 abstentions.

Ireland votes for the resolution. Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs Eamon Gilmore says

Ireland has long championed the cause of Palestinian statehood, as well as the vital importance for the entire Middle East region of a comprehensive peace settlement based on two states, Israel and Palestine, living side by side in peace and security.

Two states? Peace? Security? Is that possible?

Israeli writer Amos Oz acknowledges it is complex.

It is the only possible solution. There is no other possible solution. And I would say more than that. Down below, the majority of Israeli Jews and the majority of Palestinian Arabs know that at the end of the day there will be two states. Are they happy about it? No, they are not. Will they be dancing in the streets in Israel and in Palestine when the two-state solution is implemented? No, they will not. 

We suffer the gods to determine our futures by fixed laws of unhappiness, fear and suffering?

For it was Zeus who set

men on the path to wisdom

when he decreed the fixed 

law that suffering

alone shall be their teacher.

The world looks on. Askance.

Votes at the UN. Marches and protests. Purchases and boycotts. Rockets and missiles.

The two states are the front-line of our times. 

The world is troubled

with a lack of looking.

Into the future?

I urge my people to follow and revere

neither tyranny nor anarchy,

and to hold fear close, never to cast it out

entirely from the city. For what man 

who feels no fear is able to be just?

Two states: the state of fear and the state of justice?

A poet's conundrum. We reach for Fadwa Tuqan.

When the Tree rises up, the branches

shall flourish green and fresh in the sun

the laughter of the Tree shall leaf

beneath the sun

and birds shall return

Undoubtedly, the birds shall return.

The birds shall return.

http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/1130/breaking2.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/feb/14/amos-oz-interview

Agamemnon: stage play; Aeschylus; line 200 (chorus); translated by Alan Shapiro and Peter Burian; Oxford University Press; Oxford; 2004

Images (Cyprus 1961); poem; George Tardios; The Way to Write; book; John Fairfax and John Moat; St. Martin's Press; New York; 1981

Eumenides: stage play; Aeschylus; line 813; translated by Alan Shapiro and Peter Burian; Oxford University Press; Oxford; 2004

The Deluge and the Tree; poem; Fadwa Tuqan;

http://www.sakakini.org/literature/ftuqan.htm

www.facebook.com/DaveDuggan/Writer

POPPY PRESSURE

Men marched asleep. 

Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod.  

All went lame, all blind; 

James McClean (23) is a well-paid, professional soccer player, earning his living in The English Premiership, as an employee of Sunderland (54 degrees North, 1 degree West) Association Football Club. On Saturday last, the majority of his professional colleagues wore special team shirts, their working uniforms as designated by their employers, with a red poppy embedded on the front.

The red poppy is a symbol promoted by The Royal British Legion to coincide with Remembrance Sunday in early November to honour the members of The British Armed Forces who were killed in wars and conflicts in the 20th century and today. The symbol evokes particular memories of the horrors of World War 1 French and Belgian battlefields, on which blood-red poppies flourish.

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

James McClean chose not to wear the special shirt. His employers issued a statement affirming his right to make this choice.

An outpouring of vitriol directed against the soccer player followed, in print, broadcast and, in particular, social media.

James McClean grew up in the Creggan Estate in Derry Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West). It is a locale of mass unemployment and social deprivation all through its fifty plus years of existence. It is a site of great blood-letting in the period from the mid-nineteen sixties to the mid-nineteen nineties during which the British state, as represented by the army and the police force, engaged in violent conflict with residents of the estate, the majority of whom are Irish nationalists and a number of whom support the Irish Republican Army (IRA), in its various manifestations.

James McClean went to school in the estate, showed early athletic promise, excelled and developed in amateur ranks and went on to star for his city's professional team, Derry City Football Club, before making the dream move to Sunderland AFC. His life's journey so far is the classic fable of many young men from housing estates such as Creggan, who achieve economic salvation through their feet (footballers) or their fists (boxers).

The particular circumstances of James McClean's home place in the context of wars involving the British Army makes the wearing of a poppy a complex choice for him. Any pragmatic approach can only work if James McClean's sophisticated negotiation of his new circumstances in relation to his parents' circumstances are embedded in the complexities of that home place.

He is from streets where the British Army, as well as losing members to the IRA, perpetrated numerous killings.

Would you wear a poppy at your work if it meant your parents' home getting attacked?

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues

Ironically young men like James McClean are the very victims of the immolations in wars that the wearing of the poppy symbol seeks to recall to mind. Had James McClean grown up in Sunderland, he might now be in military rather than in sporting uniform, killing and being killed in Afghanistan.

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

He is better off in the red and white striped uniform of Sunderland AFC, blazing down the left wing, swinging over fierce crosses, exciting fans who have taken James McClean to their hearts. Among them are many who served in the British Army or who have ancestors and relatives who served. They understand the complexity of these matters and know only to well that no one should be under pressure to do anything, including wearing a poppy.

The lesson to be learned is that freedom of choice only functions if a complex network of legal, educational, ethical, economic and other conditions is present as the invisible background to the exercise of our freedom.

Dulce et Decorum Est: poem; Wilfred Owen; from Scanning the Century; The Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Poetry; book; Peter Forbes (ed.); Penguin; London; 2000

Why Obama is more than Bush with a human face: article; Slavoj Zizek; The Guardian; London; 13.11.2012 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/13/obama-ground-floor-thinking?INTCMP=SRCH

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter

WAR, BY ALL MEANS, WAR

Look at that, gentlemen. Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavour shrink to insignificance. 

So speaks Patton, the US general, in the film of the same name. As to Patton, the one hundred year old family construction company from the town of Ballymena (54 degrees North, 6 degrees West), news of moves into receivership, with over 200 persons being made redundant, confirms the truth of the belligerent general's remark.

War is everywhere. In the week the construction company collapses, the British Prime Minister is in The Gulf selling weapons of mass destruction to despotic regimes.

The UK and the world economy are on a permanent war footing.

We do believe countries have a right to defend themselves. And we do believe Britain has important defence industries that employ over 300,000 people and so that sort of business is completely legitimate and right.

The Patton family business survived the Troubles (military war) but now collapses in the recession (economic war.) Such are the perils of globalisation. Would Patton the company be thriving if, instead of building hospitals, schools and houses, it built war jets?

Or speculated with hedge funds and currencies, as banks do? Banks are globalised, so anything banks do anywhere, impacts everywhere, including in the north-east of Ireland.

This is the home region for Ulster-Scots people, many of who's ancestors became US soldiers and presidents. Seventeen of the 44 presidents of the USA can be traced back to sources in the north-east of Ireland, from among 18th and 19th century emigrants.

Will new emigrants leave the region now, perhaps to America, more likely to Australia, and forge new political dynasties there?

Meanwhile, global companies generate wealth using an enslaved class of persons in China. These 21st century slaves experience Modernity as success measured by the possession of an iPad and a car. 

There is a war under-way. A relentless war.

The Northern Ireland Executive announces a new economic initiative to respond to this war. It includes relief on parking charges; schemes for public work by young and long-term unemployed. Small arms? Big guns boom elsewhere.

All parties in The Northern Ireland Executive are in favour of a preferential rate of corporation tax, to lure global companies to the region as Foreign Direct Investment.

Sub-contractors to Patton lose jobs/money/work and face closure, including suppliers of sand and gravel. In no time at all.

..... in the time it took a dolly to travel

along its little track

to the point where two movie stars' heads

had come together smackety-smack

and their kiss filled the whole screen,

those two great towers directly across the road 

at Moy Sand and Gravel

had already washed, at least once, what had flowed 

or been dredged from Blackwater's bed

Following on the recent disembowelling of the FG Wilson engineering plants in the north-east region of Ireland (see Breathingwithalimp: THE WRATH OF CATS; 5/10/2012), the impact of globalisation on regional family firms is evidently tumultuous. 

Are efforts under-way to dismantle regional, productive, economic activity, involving a nexus of indigenous political and economic forces and external economic predators? 

There are casualties. Hypocrisy. Blood. Gore. Slaves. Victims.

The Prime Minister today embarked on a three day visit to the Middle East, as fears grow in the region about Iran's nuclear programme. During the short trip, he hopes to help sell as many as 100 Typhoon jets to the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman. It is highly unusual for a Prime Minister to be so open about the need to win defence contracts.

What further grimness may yet be dredged from the black waters of economic war?

Patton: film; Franklin J. Shaffner; Twentieth Century Fox; Los Angeles; 1970

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066206/quotes

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/defence/9655254/David-Cameron-defends-legitimate-arms-deals-during-Gulf-states-tour.html

Moy Sand and Gravel: book; Paul Muldoon; Faber and Faber; London 2002

www.facebook.com/DaveDugganWriter